Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference and disgust; hatred alone is immortal.
— William Hazlitt
Americans didn't invent Hate; it's bred in our bones.
But it took another 2,500 years for anyone in the West to realize how Hate is baked into our species.
Sigmund Freud—borrowing a theory from his disciple Sabina Spielrein—called Love the "self-preservative instinct" and Hate the drive that compels us to "lead organic life back into the inanimate state."
When I see vigilantes, I think of Freud, grappling as he was with the horrors of World War I. And I see vigilantes' conspicuous Hate—their vivid displays of anger and aggression—as open expressions of a narcissistic neurosis; as the "dark side of love" on parade for all to watch.
Their conspicuous kind of Hate—Hate, American Style—reveals that Americans crave discord, division, destruction, and death.
It shows Americans love to hate.
Can a second civil war be far away?